Bannon loses it, claims he can’t be racist because he had a Black classmate

In his "60 Minutes" interview, Trump's white supremacist ex-adviser Steve Bannon claims he does not need to be "lectured by limousine liberals" about diversity because he "went to an integrated Catholic school" that had one Black kid in his graduating class.

By all accounts, Charlie Rose’s interview on “60 Minutes” with former Trump adviser and white nationalist Breitbart chair Steve Bannon was a predictable train wreck.

BANNON: I was raised in a desegregated neighborhood. The north side of Richmond is predominantly black, OK? I went to an integrated school, a Catholic school. I served in the military. I don’t need to be lectured by a bunch of limousine liberals, OK, from the upper east side of New York or from the Hamptons, OK, about any of this. My lived experience is that.

Leaving aside the absurdity of a former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood film producer claiming liberals are just too privileged to understand his mindset, Bannon’s “integrated Catholic school” was not actually all that integrated:

Even if Bannon’s characterization of his school as “integrated” was not a massive stretch, to claim that attending a school with Black students makes one supportive or empathetic of civil rights or diversity is ridiculous.

Having individual Black friends, let alone classmates, does not mean a person cannot view themselves as superior to Black people, or be averse to associating with Black people, as a whole. Donald Sterling employed Black men and had an affair with a woman of color, and none of this prevented him from holding racist views about Black sports fans attending his NBA games.

If Bannon sought to prove in this interview that he values diversity, he completely failed. His idea of what constitutes diversity, and what constitutes respect for it, are shallow caricatures that could only be dreamed of by a white supremacist mind.

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